With a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the AsunciÓn of the Mihanovich Line swung out through the shipping of a crowded port and was off down the Paraguay. The steamer was easily the equal of the best on the Hudson; its officers and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as you or I, though the passengers ran to all shades, and it was little short of startling to see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty Brazilian half-Indians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by prairie-like stretches studded with dainty palm-trees, like wheels of greenery on the ends of broomsticks, sped rapidly past. We stopped at several towns and estancias, now in Brazil, now in Paraguay; here and there a lone passenger, standing erect in his boat, was rowed out by a pair of peons, and picked up as we slowed down for a moment. On the second morning we halted at the estate of an Irishman on Brazilian soil, the passengers going to inspect a jaguar and a huge wild-cat in home-made cages, while cow-boys roped a steer and, dragging it down to the edge of the bank to spare themselves the labor of carrying the carcass, slaughtered in plain sight of all what was served as beefsteak that noon and evening. Now and again we put in at a little Paraguayan town, swarming with barefoot boy-soldiers in faded khaki, with a reputation for shooting on the slightest provocation. Old women came on board with bread, watermelons, and clumsy native cigars, scorning Brazilian money, and demanding the ragged and all but worthless bills of their own land. Here a new language appeared, the palatal GuaranÍ sounding on all sides. The evening of the second day brought us to Villa ConcepciÓn, one of the six incorporated “cities” of Paraguay, which might easily be mistaken for a village. An occasional estancia along the bank had a little railroad, with screeching toy locomotives and an electric lighting plant of its own. The Paraguayan gaucho, or cow-boy, had the independent air of men who will not be imposed upon. He wore a large straw hat, a colored kerchief about his neck, the chiripÁ, huge, baggy cotton trousers with a puckering-string about his bare ankles as a protection against the gnats and climbing insects, and in most cases a blacksmith’s leather apron with a long fringe, a necessity for riders through the thorny undergrowth. Over this all wore a wide leather belt, with several buttoned pockets bulging with their probably not great wealth, and a big knife in a leather scabbard stuck in carelessly behind, as if ever ready to be drawn on the instant.

On the morning of the fourth day I was awakened by a long blast of the whistle, and peered out of my hammock to find the steamer anchored among extensive docks. It was that soft moment of dawn when the sun is just trembling in stage-fright below the eastern horizon, the lower sky streaked with delicate colors, the air of that velvety texture known only at such hours in the tropics. Then the day blazed forth in all its brilliancy, putting the night breeze to ignominious rout, and disclosing a low city, its chief square lined by two-story buildings, the largest of which I recognized, from photographs, as Paraguay’s government palace. One of a score of hirsute, piratical-looking boatmen, neo-poetic names painted in gaudy colors on the poops of their crafts, rowed me ashore with a few strokes, and at the wooden steps of the custom-house answered my “How much?” with a “What it pleases you, seÑor.” Either the boatmen of AsunciÓn are unlike their tribe elsewhere, or my face had lost that innocent, childlike air of earlier days. I rewarded his honesty with two Paraguayan dollars,—that is, about eleven cents,—and marching through my trunk-burdened fellow-passengers, thrust my bundle toward a pompous cholo in a cream-colored suit. He peered through the slit in my deerskin kodak-cover, asked a question about the bundled developing-tank, waved a hand with a regal-toned “Puede retirarse,” (“You may withdraw yourself”), and I stepped ashore in AsunciÓn del Paraguay.

The capital of the Inland Republic is its only real city, claiming some eighty thousand inhabitants, or one tenth the present population of a land that once, with nearly two millions, ranked with Brazil and the Argentine as the most important of South America. To-day, thanks to revolutions; anarchy, Lopez and his French mistress, and the consequent stagnation, it is in the far background of modern progress. It spreads over a considerable space of what is really rolling ground—though to one fresh from nearly two years in the Andes it seemed monotonously flat. Across the river, on a curve of which it halts abruptly, lies the sea-flat, trackless chaco, the abode of nomadic Indians, dense-blue by day, and fading to purple under the setting sun. Unfortunately, Francia, “El Supremo,” dictator for a third of a century, sought to “beautify” the town by filling its lagoons, straightening its jumble of tortuous lanes, and reducing it to a featureless similarity to all other capitals of its kind and size. Travelers of past centuries are agreed that the chief charm of old AsunciÓn was due to its delightful irregularity. Certainly its ancient fascination is gone, and to-day it is nothing but a languid little capital of a stagnant country, the least interesting of any I had seen in South America.

The time-worn assertion that the population of Paraguay is wholly Indian in blood is a decided overstatement. In AsunciÓn one sees at least as many whites as in La Paz. Nor is it true that there are nine women to every man. True, Francia wiped out the old Spaniards for conspiring against him; forty years ago, in the days of Lopez, the wars reduced the proportion to seventeen to one. But time and migrating males have all but repaired these ravages, though many a man still lives on the exertions of his harem, one of the several women of which is his legal wife, and the majority of children born in the country are illegitimate. In general the place has a different atmosphere, a blasÉ air little like the towns of the Andes. Among these less simple people, particularly the denizens of the “Centro EspaÑol,” where I was “put up” during my stay, one got the feeling that conventionality was not morality; there was something about their suave, well-bred manners that made one feel that deep down they were no such sticklers for honesty and justice as for the urbanities of life. Or would the artificiality of any “civilized” place have struck a discordant note to one coming suddenly out of a long stay in the wilderness?

It is in AsunciÓn that the traveler from the north notes the first advance of the immigration that is to increase to swamping proportions in the Argentine, as he moves southward. Paraguay is making strenuous, though not very tactful, efforts to increase immigration, under an immigration bureau in the hands of a German. Commerce and government are largely in the hands of foreigners, at least of the second generation, even the president being a Swiss in blood and name. Paraguay’s civilization is not strong enough to absorb the newcomers; one hears German, Italian, or Catalan almost as often as the native Guarani. This latter is the real speech of the country. Spanish is spoken only in the cities, and even there the people use among themselves the remnants of the aboriginal tongue. Teachers in large villages often cannot speak Castilian; the few Paraguayan countrymen who know it are “afraid” to use it for fear their fellows will ridicule them for trying to show off. There has been more than one movement on foot to make Guarani the official, as well as the actual, language of the country.

The money of Paraguay has fallen to low estate. Step into a bank and throw down an English sovereign, and there will be thrust upon you some $90 in native currency, bringing the peso down to little more than the value of our nickel. Metal money is unknown; the paper bills made in London and New York are in universal use, the smaller denominations being ragged and dirty to the point of illegibility, and often patched with scraps of newspaper. “The nation,” runs the device on these tattered billetes “recognizes this bill as fifty strong dollars,” which is quite different from saying it will be redeemed at that rate. Street-car fares, now 75, had been 67½ centavos, and the company had found it necessary to print its own change in 2½-centavo pieces, worth—well, let fractional experts figure it out. Eggs sold in the market at $7 a dozen; a hair-cut cost $5, and it was not a five-dollar hair-cut. On the other hand, postage is the cheapest on earth, evidently because the rates had been established and the stamps printed before the money depreciated.

After the first investigation I put off replenishing my wardrobe until I should reach Buenos Aires. It was not merely because the tailor showed me shoddy stuff and demanded $350 for a suit of it! The local styles were even more startling than the price mentioned in so offhand a manner. The trousers demanded by custom, for example, be they made by a local tailor or imported from Europe, are built up as high as trousers could by any stretch of the word go; then on top of this comes an enormous belt-piece, so wide that it requires three buttons to fasten it, clamping the garment up about the armpits. If only they would use a couple of inches more, they could button the trousers about the neck, fasten a collar on them, and dispense with the expense of a shirt entirely. In the olden days, it is said, the Inca tribes gave the inhabitants of this region the name of “guara-ni” (breechless ones). The bloomer-like amplitude of the trousers of the countryman, and the height of those of his city cousin, suggests that they resent the implied insult keenly, and have resolved to leave no opportunity for its repetition. Somewhere around this uncharted expanse of trouser every one, from merchant to peon, wears a leather belt at least six inches wide, a combination of coin and revolver carry-all, held together with several buckles of the size of those on a horse’s saddle-cinch.

The “International” train leaves AsunciÓn every Wednesday and Saturday morning, and lands the traveler in Montevideo or Buenos Aires fifty hours later. The through and local fares vary greatly, the former being subjected to the competition of the river steamers. First and second-class rates to Buenos Aires are $450 and $325 respectively; local fares are $680 and $460! Luckily, this is in Paraguayan currency; but even when turned into real money, it remains a respectable rate. For half a day we steamed across broad pampas, almost prairies, backed by wooded ridges, isolated masses of dark rock standing forth here and there in the middle distance, dim outlines of low mountains hovering on the horizon. The broad savannas were speckled with cattle, somewhat gaunt, but of vastly better stock than those of the Andes, a bulky China bull here and there explaining the improvement.

Every man on the train was armed, the weapons varying from flint-lock, muzzle-loading horse-pistols to the very latest automatic. The revolver is a sign of caste in Paraguay; my companions accepted me as one of them only when I had shown my own. When the conductor came through for tickets, his friends and acquaintances playfully pointed their weapons at him. The faces of many, even youthful, men were scarred from the latest revolution, like the battered faÇades of AsunciÓn. Every native aboard,—women, children, the train-crew, even the train-guard in his white uniform and helmet—smoked big, black cigars, which are really nothing more than the blackened natural leaf rolled up in cigar form. Brown maidens, physically not unattractive, sat with a half-smoked stogy in a corner of their mouths, and now and then spat through their teeth like New York toughs. The cigarette, all but universal elsewhere on my journey, finds slight favor in Paraguay. At the stations, peons in baggy chiripÁs mingled with estancieros, their neck-high trousers tucked into soft leather boots, a silver-headed rebenque, or short riding-whip, hanging from their wrists by a leather thong. Women squatted on the brick flaggings, selling anything from raw beefsteaks to the native fire-water. Though there were many stations, the towns were rarely visible, except a single church-tower marking the site some distance off. Being built on knolls, the expense of entering them has been avoided by the railway constructors. The few that were seen were triste at best, the populations, lolling about the openings that serve as doors, ragged and ambitionless. At Loque station, women wearing from ten to fifty coarse straw hats each, languidly offered them for sale. At PatiÑo a crude tramway was waiting to carry to the bank of the river the passengers for San Bernadino, Paraguay’s “watering-place,” on the beautiful fresh-water lake of Ypacarai. Then came Paraguari, famous for its revolutions, commercial center of all the old missions for a hundred miles around, leaf-roofed, two-wheel carts awaiting freight or passengers. Seventy-five miles from the capital we skirted Villa Rica, second city of the Inland Republic, with a commerce in tobacco, sugar, and lumber, but a mere village in all but name.

At the small prairie station of Borja, from which some fellow-countrymen were constructing a branch line some day to reach the IguazÚ Falls, I abandoned the “International,” and was soon speeding away across the flat country in a track automobile. At best the Paraguyan landscape is monotonous, vast plains of reddish soil and coarse grass stretching away until lost to view, here and there broken by thick clumps of forest. Ever and again we were slowed down or halted by reddish half-wild cattle on the unfenced track; the pampa was sprinkled with them as far as the eye could see. The plains either are, or are fancied to be, of no value for agriculture, and are left to grazing, while the languid natives, swinging in their hammocks under their wall-less roofs in the edges of the forest clumps, raised a bit of corn and tobacco in plantations hacked out of the woods, and trusted Providence for the rest. Ponderous, springless, two-wheeled ox-carts that seemed all wheels labored by. Everywhere the tacurÚ, or cone-shaped ant-hills, stood head-high in the tall grass. My companions told of tacurÚs erected during a single night in the middle of earth-floored dwellings and requiring the exertions of a band of workmen to dig them out.

At length we drew up before the rough-board headquarters at CharanÁ. It being Saturday evening, the entire region, men, women, and children, proposed to ride into Borja on the work-train, to squander their month’s wages and remain several days drunk. The young American superintendent, however, issued orders to the Paraguayan soldiers that had been assigned him, and though these looked anything but fierce in their ragged khaki and bare feet, the throng lost no time in obeying their orders to disembark. For all their childlike demeanor, the soldiers of Paraguay have a reputation for shooting on scant provocation.

We pushed on along battered old rails, through forest and jungle, with here and there a bank of red clay, some ten miles to railhead, the line squirming its way around every knoll, the cheap engines to be employed requiring that there be nothing steeper than a one percent grade. Advance gangs had hacked out a cart-road for some distance beyond, where the territory was growing so dense-wooded and hilly that the superintendent was considering the use of balloons to survey the country.

Back at the main camp I had my first mate, or “Paraguayan tea.” The yerba mate is to the life of Paraguay and its adjoining regions what coca leaves are to the Andes. In the yerbales the leaves and smaller branches of an evergreen bush not unlike the holly, growing among taller trees, are spread on a raised platform of poles, smoked and dried, forced through to the earth floor beneath, beaten almost to a powder with clubs, and packed in tercios by sewing up green ox-hides, which shrink until the contents is stone-hard. The gringo engineers had come to prefer this native beverage to coffee or tea, though they drank it in cups, with sugar and milk. The native way is to put a spoonful of the powdered yerba in a little pear-shaped gourd, pour this full of boiling water, and suck the “tea” through a brass or silver tube, or in the case of the poorer people, a reed. One spoonful suffices for a score of persons, the gourd being passed from one to another of a group, each time being refilled with water, the drinker taking care not to burn hands or lips on gourd or tube. To any but a foreigner it would be an insult to offer a separate bowl. The greenish liquid was bitter in taste and by no means pleasant, but was due in time to become my favorite beverage, as it does with most gringos who continue the use of it. Everywhere in this region one runs upon natives loafing in the shade, a mate-gourd, sometimes carved with fantastic figures, grasped in one hand, lazily imbibing the liquid at regular intervals. Unlike the coca, it has no narcotic effect; it is, on the contrary, beneficial in stomachic ailments. The gaucho of the pampas makes it serve as bread and vegetables in his fixed diet of asado con cuero, or beef roasted in the hide. Many an attempt has been made to introduce mate to the rest of the world, so far, unfortunately, in vain.

I fell asleep toward dawn on a cot set out in the breeze, to the rattle of poker-chips, the clinking of bottles and glasses, and cries of “One hundred dollars!” “Two hundred and fifty!” from the “office” in which the gringo community had gathered. Next evening a local train set me down in the heavy darkness at Villa EncarnaciÓn, up to a few months before the halting-place for the night of the “Internacional.” In name one of the six “cities” of Paraguay, the place was a drowsy, barefoot, isolated cluster of buildings, rather than a town. Strewn along the side of a red hill, amid half-luxuriant vegetation, on the banks of the ParanÁ, the southern boundary of Paraguay, it covered a considerable space of rolling, grassy ground, with wide paths of reddish sand where streets should have been. Its slight commerce was chiefly in the hands of Germans. It was humid with the rainy season, and insolent with its big ragged garrison. Green parrots screamed in and out of the orange-groves, the fruit of which was green in color even when ripe and of rather acid taste. Across the ParanÁ, as wide as the Hudson, Posadas, in the Argentine, lay banked up on the sloping opposite shore, in plain sight from any part of the town.

Life is free and easy in Paraguay, close to nature. Its women, in their loose gowns and bare feet, very erect from the practice of carrying loads on their heads from childhood, have a childlike simplicity, as well as an extremely graceful carriage. Yet I found this the least interesting of South American countries. Its old missions, to the ruined churches of which, overgrown with creepers, a ride of a day or two from the railroad at almost any point brings one, attract many travelers; but I had already seen these and better in tropical Bolivia. With its education at a low ebb, chiefly in the hands of priests to whom sacred history and catechisms are the sum total of wisdom, the present inhabitants of Paraguay leave the impression of being incapable of much advancement.

The change from this languid little country to the live one across the river was almost startling. When the sun had declined somewhat, a motor-boat chugged across to Posadas with a score of passengers, where we landed without ceremony among a group of Argentine officials, well-dressed and courteously business-like. To those coming upon it from the direction of Buenos Aires, Posadas may seem small and backward; in contrast with the drowsy, little grass-grown Paraguayan “city” still in plain sight across the ParanÁ, it is very much alive. The capital of the territory of Misiones, that tongue of land piercing far up between Brazil and Paraguay and taking its name from the Jesuit establishments of olden times, it already boasts some ten thousand inhabitants, or more than the entire territory contained ten years ago. In spite of being tolerably compact and two-storied in the business section, the town covers a vast amount of ground, with very wide streets and ample elbow-room everywhere, except in the clustered shacks of laborers along the river-brink. A single church, its old red-brick tower still unfinished, rather Protestant than Catholic in appearance, by reason of the simplicity of its adornments and the existence of seats within, takes the place of the score or more that would bulk above a town of similar size in the Andes. Here were hard-paved streets instead of sand-holes, steam road-rollers and up-to-date machinery, business activity and shoes, well-kept parks with plenty of benches, large, prominent buildings as schools—just opening for the new year in this first week in March—and well-dressed policemen of manly demeanor. Canvas cots had taken the place of hammocks. Boys were busy polishing brass name-plates before important business houses. The red liberty-cap now adorned all government shields, while the most beautiful flag of South America, the Argentinian white and sky-blue, flew at the crest of many a faÇade. Here a stranger could pass in the streets without being stared out of countenance. The inhabitants had a look of eagerness and hope in their faces, signs of at least a material prosperity in striking contrast to the dreary hopelessness of Andean regions. Yet Posadas is not forty years old, while EncarnaciÓn, across the river, was founded by the Jesuits more than three centuries ago.

In the second-class car of the N.E.A., the “Nord Este Argentino,” there were no Indian passengers, and though only a mixto, the train made good progress. At the very first farm outside Posadas an American binder was felling the autumn grain—and I had not seen so much as a mower since crossing the Rio Grande thirty months before. At every station were uniformed police; mounted, officers patroled the country roads. Houses along the way were not the dens of human animals, but were supplied with the comforts of home, even American rocking-chairs tucked away in the shade of their verandas. I had come to the end of the great South American monte and jungle, and from now on the great Argentine pampas grew ever broader, slightly rolling here, stretching away to infinity on each hand. The brick-red soil of Misiones was given over to grazing rather than to agriculture, though we passed long autumn-dry corn-fields, the ears broken half off and hanging over to ripen. Cattle were everywhere, and cow-boys were roping them here and there, while gauchos careered across the broad plains on their hardy pintos. The railroad and all its appurtenances were just as orderly as they would have been in England, the railway architecture of which it resembled, though the cars were of the American style. Everything from engine to yards was so English one felt sure that, had they spoken their language, the traincrews would have called the little four-wheeled freight-cars “goods-vans,” and spoken of “metals” and “sleepers.”

It was some time after dark that we pulled into Santo TomÉ, or at least into a station bearing that name, and I concluded that I had ridden far enough for the time being. The train did not enter the town, perhaps because it would have been hard to decide just where the town was. In the Argentine these are scattered over a vast amount of ground, in striking contrast to the heaped-up crowding common to the Andes. A half-moon dim-lighted the flat country far and wide. I set out in the moonlight along a broad highway, and wandered until any hope of finding a town died out; then ran upon a few low, scattered houses that suggested some insignificant village, like Bolivia’s tropical “cities”; then I went on and on until there grew up about me an immense town, never crowded together, yet with an enormous plaza, long stretches of electric arc-lamps, a checkerboard city of wide streets and long blocks, each house set in its own big garden, a town well-to-do, citified, with many automobiles, and but a single church, of moderate size and inconspicuous.

Life began to renew about the station at 3 A.M. The restaurant opened, watchmen lighted big gasoline arc-lamps, the “International” rolled in, and we were off again, with ample room even in the second-class car. Three hours later I sat up to watch the sun rise red out of Uruguay, across the river. About the vast, long-haired, unkempt plains stood clumps of pampa trees; at the towns were many gay with blossoms—spring blossoms, I had almost written, until I remembered it was autumn. The aloncita, a bird not unlike a small robin in appearance, though with less red, began to build its beehive-shaped mud nest on the wooden cross-pieces of the telegraph-poles. All day long, for hundreds of miles, there was an average of a nest on every third pole, always on the side farthest from the railroad, as if the noise of the trains were annoying to its inhabitants, the arched doorway always toward the direction from which we came—the north—to catch, perhaps, the warmer breezes. Among hundreds of nests I saw only three or four exceptions to this, and all day long only one built anywhere else than on the cross-piece, close against the pole. One daring architect had set his on the top of the pole itself, neatly capping it. As this particular pole had its cross-piece already occupied, it looked as if the bird above was a hard-headed fellow who had failed to stake his claim in time, but who insisted, nevertheless, on living in that particular spot.

The country grew more and more like our own, in climate, creature comforts, news-stands, block-signals, uniformed mailmen, carts and wagons, some of them of the boat-shaped style of Poland, rattling past on broad highways, busy towns along the way, at only the more important of which the train halted briefly, and between them raced swiftly and smoothly southward. Through the windows the horizon of the great rolling pampa continually rose and fell. Sometimes it was punctuated with a grove of trees, more rarely with a small forest, the chiefly unfenced plains everywhere sprinkled with cattle. Here and there a Ñandu, the South American ostrich, trotted awkwardly away across the prairie. Where there were fences, the wires ran through the posts by holes bored in them, rather than being secured by staples. Well-tended fields of fruit-trees in long rows seemed incongruous in South America; it brought a feeling of satisfaction to see industry and decent living again, things being done, instead of merely doing themselves. Some industrious country boys climbed a fence with bags of large, juicy watermelons for sale; boys merely in quest of pocket-money and not because their livelihood depended upon it. The population at large was too busy to bother with station hawking. Countrymen wore bombachos, enormous bloomer-like trousers, tucked into soft top-boots or drawn up about the bare ankles above their alpargatas, or hempen soles, as if the cost of cloth were of no importance. Any lady would have remained ladylike in them. Now and then the river drew up so close beside us that we could look far off across Uruguay, spread out on the other side.

At length we sighted ahead, a sort of oriental mist hovering about it, a whitish city with a two-tower church suggesting minarets, a city set on a knoll, not unlike Jerusalem. Yet this was not the town we were approaching, but Salto, in the “RepÚblica Oriental” over the river. Great fields of grapes, well tended, began to race by us, suburban houses thickened, and we drew up at the in-all-respects-complete city of Concordia, four hundred miles south of Posadas on the frontier I had left twenty-four hours before. In the Andes, world-famous cities had been mere languid villages; in the Argentine, places the world at large had never heard of were large, flourishing metropolises. Concordia numbers twenty thousand inhabitants, virtually all white and all alive. Yet it is not even the capital, but merely the second city of the Province of the Entre Rios—“Between the Rivers” ParanÁ and Uruguay, famous for its saladerÍas, or beef-salting establishments. Well spread out, it has few churches and no over-supply of priests, the former with few bells and those of agreeable tone, which are rung, not too often, instead of being beaten with an infernal din. Liquor-shops are few; the majority of the population finds something more worth while than shopkeeping. Its inhabitants know how to pass two abreast on the sidewalks; women on bicycles bring a frequent start of surprise; swarms of cleanly dressed boys and girls sally forth from big, well-equipped schools, where coeducation reigns; bootblacks clad like business men and carrying upholstered and decorated seats seek their clients in the well-kept streets and plazas; electric street-cars give excellent service. Electric lights both in streets and houses were even more brilliant than our own; the public library was actually open and “functioning,” and did hot spend its time staring at the foreigner who had come to read. In the “Hotel Garabaldi”—just such a place as the name implies—wine was served with meals as freely as in Europe, and though only the abode of workingmen, it was superior to the best hostelry of Andean cities. Real beds had now taken the place of canvas cots; at the rear was an electric-lighted cancha de bochas, or outdoor bowling alley for the clientÈle of Italian workmen.

I slipped across the river next afternoon to Salto, in Uruguay, adding another country to my growing collection. One went and came freely; without frontier formalities. Salto is large, and several times older than Concordia, with many well-built buildings, yet with a suggestion of “seediness,” a bit more squalor and barefootedness, its church not so imposing and well-kept as it looks at a distance, its policemen in rather shiny and threadbare uniforms, its streets cobbled, rather than smoothly paved. In short, it is more Spanish in type, more clustered together, with a general air suggesting that this is not quite so live and hopeful a country as that over the river. Many proud old families live here; yet the head of more than one of them slips across daily to do business in the Argentine.

One can go on from Concordia to Buenos Aires by rail, but I chose to take the overnight journey on a big Mihanovich river-steamer, with all the conveniences of an ocean liner. The flat, sometimes rolling, occasionally bushy shores of the Uruguay were broken by several towns, notably the two model establishments producing Leibig’s extract of beef. When I returned on deck next morning a brilliant sun was pouring its rays blindingly over the stream misnamed the Plata, the “River of Silver,” by Sebastian “Gaboto”—who was none other than our own Sebastian Cabot—because he fancied it ran uphill to the silver mines of Peru. The Indians called it the ParanÁ-GuazÚ, the “River Large as a Sea,” a truer name, for on the right it stretched away to the dimmest of broken land forms, and soon these, too, disappeared, and a reddish-brown sea spread unbroken to the horizon. For a time we hugged the Uruguayan shore, then swung the blazing sun around behind us and struck out for what, but for its color, might have been the open sea. Soon we began to pass buoys of the Argentine government, marked “R. A. m. o. p.,” with the kilometers to the end of my journey painted upon them. Toward eight, where the yellow sea and the bluish-gray sky met, the vast, perfect circle of the horizon was broken by a patch of faint white. It was only a tiny narrow line down at the extreme edge of the great inverted bowl of sky above us, yet so long—several inches, in fact—that should it turn out to be a city, as I began to suspect, since we were headed directly for it, it would be a large one indeed. Then the white patch began to take on faint individual shape, and above us the wireless was spitting its message to the yet invisible world ahead. An hour later we were in the midst of buoys, large and small, marking the “Canal Sur,” or South Channel. Boats and steamers appeared, and sailing vessels spread their white wings across the yellow waters on all sides of us, while the city stretched along the horizon ahead had turned from white to gray, with a tint of red, neither color nor edifice conspicuous, except for two groups of huge brick smoke-stacks belching forth into the brilliant sky. Even after the long line of buildings had taken on definite form, and one could all but count their windows, the city seemed still to sit on the yellow sea. One was struck, too, by the narrowness of the strip; the buildings seemed for the most part a bare four stories, with only here and there one as high as ten cutting into the landless sky-line. Two tugs took possession of us, dragging us up a narrow channel through a wilderness of shipping, where we must soon stop for lack of space, until we spied an unoccupied bit of wharf and warped gradually into it. It was a late-summer morning, the ninth of March. While the rest waited for their baggage to be examined, an official glanced at my bundle, jerked a thumb scornfully over a shoulder, and I stepped out into the metropolitan rumble of—no wonder gringo residents have abbreviated it to “B.A.”—“la Ciudad y Puerto de Santa MarÍa de los Buenos Aires.”